Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, vol. 2 (Boston and New York, 1913), pp. 135-37

To Mrs. A. Carlyle

                    Ashfield, Massachusetts, July 5, 1882.

…I felt much for you, and, I trust, with you, in reading Froude’s two volumes of the Life. I have never read a book that gave me more pain, or that seemed to me more artfully malignant. I could not have believed, even of Froude, bad as I thought him, a capacity for such falseness, for such betrayal of a most sacred trust, for such cynical treachery to the memory of one who had put faith in him. I am at a lost to discover a sufficient motive for this deed.

          No unbiased person can, I believe, read the Life without a conviction that the original text – the letters – does not support Mr. Froude’s comment; that he has throughout glossed the letters in a false and evil spirit, that he has distorted their plain significance, and misinterpreted them with perverse ingenuity. The process is too open; he has revealed his own nature, and he has not succeeded in obscuring, for more than a brief moment, the real character of those to whom he has done wrong. His blows are vain, malicious mockery.

          This misrepresentation of his is, indeed, not so much a sin against those whom he called friends, as a crime against human nature itself. To attempt to pervert the image and to degrade the character of a man like Mr. Carlyle, is to do an injury to mankind.

          It is impossible to forgive him for the gross indelicacy of publishing the most private, sacred, and tender expressions of the love of two such lovers as those whose lovely letters he has ventured to print. But a more noble love-story is not to be read, - and these letters will be precious and sacred to many who will be the better for reading them, though they cannot but shrink from being the innocent accomplices in such a breach of faith. I wish that at some time you might print these letters by themselves, so that they should make their true impressions, and be relieved from the ugly setting in which they are now preserved. Indeed, it seems to me that you may have to write the true story of your Uncle’s life, or rather to give the true account of him.

          You may perhaps remember that nine years ago Mr. Emerson confided to me your Uncle’s letters to him, and that your Uncle approved his doing so. Since Mr. Emerson’s death his letters to Mr. Carlyle have also been put into my hands. I propose to edit this most interesting correspondence, and though there will be little need of my saying much, I hope in the little I may have to say to be able to do something to redress the wrong the Froude has done. . . .